The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

by Adam Tooze

Nazi agrarianism, with its florid and racist rhetoric of blood and soil and its high-flown ideas about the future of the German peasant, was not an atavistic gloss on a modern industrial regime. Nazism, both as an ideology and as a mass political movement, was the product of a society still in transition. Similarly, Hitler’s obsessive preoccupation with food was rooted in contemporary reality. Though famine had been banished from Western Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century, in large part due to Europe’s ability to tap huge new sources of overseas supply, World War I had forced the question of food supply back onto the agenda of European politics.9 The British and French blockade, though it failed to produce outright famine, did succeed in producing an epidemic of chronic malnutrition in Germany and Austria that was widely blamed for killing at least 600,000 people.10 Depression and mass unemployment brought a return of serious deprivation.11 And even in good times, at the bottom of the social scale chronic malnutrition was widespread in Germany as it was in every other European society in the early twentieth century.